“You should be ashamed of yourself, John Zetland. I always believed you were a decent man, but I was wrong.”
“What right do you have to talk to me like that, you ignorant bitch?”
Marion had never stood up to anyone like this before, and her heart felt as though it might burst out from her chest.
“I have every right, and I want you to know I hate you!”
“Hate your own brother, do you? You watch out, or I’ll really give you something to hate me for.”
His fingertips sank deep into her flesh as he grabbed her upper arms. He held her for what seemed an age, his face nothing but wild eyes amidst a mass of purple blotches. Then he shook her before pushing her away so violently her neck bones jarred as she fell backwards onto the sofa. Shock left her too stunned to speak or cry as John stormed from the room. Then the sound of the cellar door slamming shut echoed through the house.
? ? ?
WHEN SHE WOKE the next morning, at first she couldn’t remember why her eyes were sore and swollen. Then the picture of John kissing Lydia with his slick red mouth returned. A nasty, grubby feeling clung to Marion like wet mud. She remembered feeling the same way when John had brushed against her in the wax museum and when Mr. Bevan had touched her breast, only this was a thousand times worse. How could her brother behave in such a disgusting manner, kissing a pure young woman on the mouth like that?
He was nothing but a dirty old man. Memories of the way he used to look at Lydia when she was a young girl surfaced, and Marion cringed with horror. “Why didn’t I realize it before? I was blind to his gross, perverted nature. I didn’t want to see him for what he really was! That poor girl, I should never have let him near her.”
She rubbed the back of her aching neck and then rolled up the sleeves of her nightgown. The puffy white flesh of her upper arms was covered in bruises the color of thunderclouds from where he had grabbed her. A noise on the stairs made her shiver with fear. Immediately she went to her bedroom door and turned the key in the lock. Was he strong enough to break it down? she wondered. Feeling the pressure of her bladder, she realized she would have to leave her room at some point.
The look of loathing and anger in his eyes before he flung her away like an old rag doll still smoldered deep inside her. How could she share a house with someone like that? If only she could run away, leave him to that cellar—after all, that was the only thing he cared about. Marion went over to the window that looked out into the rear of the house. The sycamore tree stood at the end of the garden. When she was a little girl, Lydia used to play around it. She had a toy tea set and would pile the little plates with “salad” made from daisies and grass, then leave it for the fairies to eat. Now several branches had fallen from the tree, and all its leaves were dead. Judith had been right. It was quite rotten and probably dangerous.
Forgiving John for this behavior was unthinkable, but what choice did she have? To walk out the door? Where would she go? Was there some kind of shelter for women like her? Marion imagined herself in some huge, drab dormitory, a kind of Victorian orphanage for distressed middle-aged women, where she would lie huddled on a narrow camp bed next to rows of other lost souls like herself.
? ? ?
THE DAYS FOLLOWING the kiss, Marion felt as though she had been infected by some shivery sickness that disturbed her sleep and took away her appetite. Each time she heard his footsteps on the stairs, she would tremble with fear, imagining John storming into her bedroom to attack her once again. Most of the time she hid herself in the attic, but it was impossible to escape his presence completely. Creaking coming from his bedroom on the floor below woke her around six in the morning, then great racking phlegm-rich coughs were followed by the groan of the bathroom pipes as he washed. His breakfast was heralded by the softer, womanish moaning of the kitchen pipes and the noise of the radio made thin and whiny by its journey through the floors of the house. Then the house fell quiet until noon, when there would be more noise from the kitchen while he prepared lunch. After six in the evening, her brother emerged from the cellar for a short while to get his dinner, and then at midnight he went to bed. By learning this routine, she managed to dodge him, only nipping downstairs to retrieve scraps of food when she was sure he wouldn’t be there.
It was around midnight, a week after Lydia’s visit, when Marion realized she hadn’t heard any noise from the house since the previous evening when her brother had gone down to the cellar. She waited an hour before creeping downstairs to the landing below and saw that John’s bedroom door was wide open, the bed empty and still made up.
What could be going on? Was he going to stay down there forever?
Instead of going back to bed, Marion went farther down the landing and into her mother’s room. On the bedside table was a little bottle of pills. She picked it up, but the small white label was too faded to read. Marion opened the drawer and found a pack of tarot cards.
The box was decorated with a picture of the sun with a lovely face that stared serenely out at her. Perhaps the cards could help her decide what to do. She seemed to remember that you had to first ask a question out loud, so she shook the frayed pack from its box and began to shuffle them in her clumsy hands.
“Please help me,” she said. “I can’t believe it has come to this, but I am afraid of John. I love him, but I feel like I don’t know who he is sometimes. Worrying about things all the time is making me tired and ill. I just want to curl up in bed and pull the covers over my head forever. Please, tell me what to do.”
Marion picked out a card. It was a picture of a knight holding a sword, but she had no idea what it meant. She picked another, the hanged man. Did this mean she should hang herself? The idea of dying did not frighten her, but the thought of pain did. She had heard somewhere that death by hanging took a very long time, as one slowly choked to death. If she killed herself, then she wouldn’t have to be scared and worried all the time, would she? And also it would serve John right for behaving the way he did. Imagining how he might react to finding her body gave her an odd feeling of satisfaction.
She picked up the bottle of pills from the bedside table and unscrewed the lid. There were only three inside. That wouldn’t be nearly enough to do it; she had to look for more. She began searching through the drawers of the bedside table but found only indigestion remedies and some old eye drops.
Then she glanced towards the door of the en suite bathroom. The pills would probably be in there, but she hadn’t gone into that room since the day Mother was found dead, with her gray hair floating in the cold water, a burnt-down cigarette butt still trapped between the fingers of her outstretched hand. The thought of going in now gave Marion chills.